Texte

SONGWRITERS LOVINGLY CALL their dreams muses — a vocabulary to translate the compositional
process. Hip artists, such as Brian Eno and Suzanne
Vega, have gone so far as to say they have even heard entire songs handed down to them while
they slept.

Dreams have long fascinated composer Serge Arcuri. Yet he could never
quite bring their surreal, unearthly power to the stage with orchesiral instruments that were
hundreds of years old. “Dreams, like myths, express themselves in a symbolic language,
communication both obscure and universal,” Arcuri writes in the liner
notes to his debut CD for empreintes DIGITALes, Les méandres du rêve. “At
the heart of the night, brandished against this apparent death that is sleep, the dream world is
more a product of senses and seduction than one of speech.”

The breakthrough for the 39-year-old native of Beauharnois was hearing electroacoustic music.
This oft-misunderstood branch ofthe musical tree was born in 1949 when Pierre
Schaeffer started using a tape recorder to bulk erase the musical past and record over it
the music of the future, “musique concrète.” Forged and sculpted in the multi-track recording
studio with both live and synthetic sound sources, electroacoustic music has always been headphone
fodder, music for our personal headspace. Like dreams, electroacoustic music offers a hot-wired
short cut to the subconscious, the topology of sounds triggering something different in every
listener, a soundtrack to films and visuals limited only by our imaginations.

“I like the ease with which electroacoustic music can transport yourself into many different
acoustic surroundings,” says Arcuri. “That’s much more diffcult to do in a
concert hall. But on the other hand, I don’t like excluding instruments. I like to have a mix of
electroacoustics and live instruments, so the work is somewhere between reality of the concert
stage and the ‘inouïe’.”

Arcuri studied with Yves Daoust at
Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, and has an impressive list of commissioned works to his name
from the SMCQ, ACREQ, CBC and The Vancouver New Music Society. It’s not difficult to understand
why: Arcuri’s work avoids the studied aridity of most “musique concrète.”
It’s dazzling, texturally ravishing, and propulsive, recalling the recent pop-oriented work of
John Adams on Hoodoo Zephyr — only minus the
minimalist pulse.

Les méandres du rêve (Dreams’ Meanders) was a long-term project begun in
1982 with Arcuri’s first electroacoustic piece Errances. Arcuri tried to keep a diary of dreams and
incorporate them into the pieces as they were written, but found his dreams weren’t up to the
quality of the project, so he decided to stick to themes rather than specifics. Indeed, most of the
pieces here work on a visceral rather than literal level. Murmure, for
example, revisits tribal myths about the origins of life and the big bang through processed and
sampled breath sounds.

La porte des sables, for oboe, English horn, MIDI percussion and tape, is
inspired by the fables of Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel
The Sand Child. The music, while bereft of the quarter tones that permeate
most Arabic music, evokes the serene, still mood of the desert through the arabesques of the horn
playing. “Reading Jalloun opened my ears,” says Arcuri. “The idea of each
door leading you deeper into myth, deeper into the unconscious.”

Arcuri has had the good fortune to work with intuitive and passionate
soloists such as oboist Lawrence Cherney, harpist Erica
Goodman, French homplayer Francis Ouellet and percussionist
Trevor Tureski. “More and more instrumentalists are interested in working
with electroacoustics,” Arcuri explains. “After all, these pieces were
written to be included in someone’s repertory and to be easily played. I like to have open rhythm
sections for the player to roam. I don’t like to be a metronome.”